Blaine Cook Joins Today’s Gillmor Gang, Talks Twitter
Michael Arrington
13 comments »
He was pretty careful about what he would and wouldn’t talk about, but former Twitter Chief Architect Blaine Cook bravely faced the Gillmor Gang today to talk about the challenges facing Twitter, the feasibility of a decentralized Twitter competitor, and other Twitter related issues. The timing is perfect, as big media is starting to take notice of Twitter and its passionate users. Google engineer Bob Lee also joined the show.
The most interesting thing Blaine said in my opinion was that as of late 2007 Twitter had just three engineers (including himself) and one operations guy. No wonder they couldn’t keep the fast growing service online.
Listen to the show here. A transcript will be up shortly.
Hello to all. I am Bill Pullman, professional actor. I would like to announce that I am starting up a new intelligence video conference device that securely integrates the game of monopoly with globalized interfaces. We must accomplish the victories.
Off to listen to it to see if they left a minute or two of hold music in. That just might have been the best part of the whole show. Not.
Wow only 3 engineers +1 operations guy, it seems like some of the scaling problems could be derived from that
Yes. Equally interesting, I thought, was that there were seven other employees *not* doing software engineering or ops management.
Seems to me, that a company the size of Twitter might need the following permanent employees:
1. CEO - to raise money, publicise the company and do biz dev
2. Office manager - relatively junior role: admin, HR stuff, filing etc.
3. Software engineering and ops team
They’d need also need a part-time CFO, maybe one day a week.
It’s really not obvious to me what *seven* other people would be doing.
When I interviewed Twitter in July of 2007 they had a handful of employees almost all of whom were techie types. You can watch my interview by clicking my name on this post.
If he can’t scale twitter, he simply is the wrong person for the job. Point.
It’s a damn simple message passing system…
This message is for Blane. Blaine, I already have 10s of thousands of users on SiteSpaces.net
If you wanna partner up in LA and use that as a base for your twitter destroyer and avenge yourself and clear your name, then I would be happy to help you.
Chris
As long as I make a bunch of money out of it of course.
This is a great scoop and congraulations. That having been said, shame on Michael Arrington for mercilessy and relentlessly raking Blaine over the coals, and now that Blaine has done TechCrunch/Gillmor Gang the honor of an appearance Michael is now more balanced/sympathetic (depending upon your read of the above) without any reference whatsoever to the earllier trashings. It’s too much.
Listening to all of this, I come to 2 conclusions:
1. Could YouTube or Google or Hotmail or PayPal ever have survived/succeeded with such close close scrutiny/nit-picking?
2. Many years of Project Management experience tells me that Blaine knows the problems very very well, but perhaps too much. I’ve seen this before - a good coder gets stuck trying to understand the problem, and gets stuck in ‘deer in headlights’ mode and can’t move forward. It’s always a brave decision as head of a team or company to let this type of person go, since they always look like they’re about to solve the problem!
Have a great Weekend everyone.
-Andrew
Am I taking crazy pills, or is TechCrunch yet again flogging twitter?
How gives a fuck about this service? It is the dumbest idea, used by nobody other than a bunch of hipsters and tech nads (who desperately try to seem cool, but ain’t).
Seriously, could you waste more time and space on a more useless example of useless Web 2.0 meets RoR-developer pretension?